Why are people so hung up on having a dock instead of a full width taskbar??? What's with all these gaps all over the place? I really hate that fad. And wayland as default in KDE Neon? Not my favorite.
HDR support though... that's nice.
Anyway, like they say: Don't knock it 'til you try it.
So I guess I'll download the image and run it in a VM to try it out.
I like how gaps make things feel a little less cluttered, and show off the colors of my wallpaper. Same reason I use i3 with gaps on. It feels like everything is nicely organized instead of shoved together. In the end it's just an aesthetic preference.
Meh. I have a 1px gap for all my windows on bspwm. But I also have no bar at all. I just commit one workspace to a full screen btop on session start.
Am I wasting screen space? Probably...at the end of the day, I feel more organized, but others could easily point out that ideally I'd have 0 gaps and no btop and no bar, and that would be best for organization. Afaic, it's just personal preference.
It's a feel thing. I have two screens, with a minimalistic bar taking about 15 pixels on the top side of the secondary monitor. No opened apps or anything displayed there, to see that I'll just press Alt tab or the plasma overview (very gnome-like). That feels less cluttered than a bar that, to have the floating effect, steals me more vertical space than what I have.
This is very personal so it's nice that KDE let's us do whatever we want. IDK about the default choices as long as they let us change it to whatever we like, so I don't really care.
It's additional space around components showing what's behind it. So you're seeing more stuff in between windows, making it look less organised imo. The "whitespace" isn't really white here. It looks like another unnecessary element crammed inbetween two windows that might as well just sit neatly next to one another, making the windows slightly larger. I also like being able to move my mouse to the edge of things (e.g. the taskbar) without ending up in the whitespace, which causes misclicks for me.
Again, my opinion. Not stating absolute truths here.
As long as autohide works reliably, I don't care what it looks like. I almost never interact with it anyway since I just use the keyboard to launch things.
Yeah also don't like the dock, but with KDE Plasma at least you can make it full width as it is so nicely customizable. VM, oooo I wonder how it will run there, I guess it will be quite slow, at least Plasma 5 was a lot slower in VB for me than later on real hardware, so it might not be well representative.
Yeah I hear good things about qemu. Will really have to reserve some time to learn it some day. And just for kicks I have just tried and installed KDE Neon into VirtualBox too, and damn I am actually surprised how fast Plasma runs under it, definitely faster than Plasma 5 did. Another job well done :)
Just to get back to you, I installed it as well and I was surprised how fast it ran.
I couldn't change the resolution in the VM however. It would only give me a black screen. So I was stuck with a basic small resolution.
I also noticed that you can't change the taskbar style from floating to fully a docked taskbar that takes up all the space without gaps. That's a shame in my opinion. But as soon as you open an application window, it does take that "no gap" shape.
I have a 4k and a 21:9 1440p display and I'm sure anyone who gives 5 seconds to think about it will agree the bottom panel is a total waste of space past the usual 1920px width - unless you have an absurd amount of widgets there.
So not only I agree with the gaps, but I have my panel centered to approx. a third of the display width and there's still plenty of space to fit open windows there.
Full width panel is a legacy choice that just doesn't make much sense with nowadays screens.